Central railway station is located at the southern end of the Sydney central business district and is the largest and busiest railway station in New South Wales. It services almost all of the lines on the Sydney Trainsnetwork, and is the major terminus for NSW TrainLink services. It sits adjacent to Railway Square and is officially located in Haymarket.
Central is the busiest station in New South Wales when taking into account actual weekly patronage, with 11.35 million passenger movements in 2013.
There have been three terminal stations in Sydney. The original Sydney station was opened on 26 September 1855 in an area known as Cleveland Fields. This station (one wooden platform in a corrugated iron shed), called Redfern, had Devonshire Street as its northern boundary.
When this station became inadequate for the traffic it carried, a new station was built in 1874 on the same site and also called Redfern. This was a brick building with two platforms. It grew to 14 platforms before it was replaced by the present-day station to the north of Devonshire Street. The new station was built on a site previously occupied by the Devonshire Street Cemetery,[1] a convent, a female refuge, a police barracks, a parsonage, and a Benevolent Society. The remains exhumed from the cemetery were re-interred at several other Sydney cemeteries including Rookwood and Waverley cemeteries. Bodies were moved to Botany by steam tram motors and flat cars.